Yesterday’s Bobs song du jour: “First I Was a Hippie, Then I Was a Stockbroker, Now I Am a Hippie Again”; a plagal cadence for the angels.
This week I was puttering with a passage in Fair Warning, a non-retrogradeable rhythm which does not round out to an even beat, thus repetition of the pattern provides fresh relations against the underlying meter. Not that this rhythmic game is The Thing (though it is, I think, playfully cool). It’s one element which serves as a ‘binding’. Both structural, and yet generating surface interest as well.
So, the non-ret. rhythm will ‘round out’ to the even crotchet after the fourth iteration. Decided to set a contrapuntal voice in the bass augmented by a factor of 3 (16th-note = dotted-eighth), and entering some eleven-ish bars in. So we’ve got (drumroll, please) . . . contrast (the two voices moving at different paces); unity (the two voices adhere to the same pattern); & convergence upon the same goal.
I’ve been listening to a ton of Martinů lately. This morning, though, it’s William Schuman’s Symphony № 3 played by the Seattle Symphony, coducted by Gerard Schwarz.
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